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How a gunfight in New Orleans over pasta production, and the assassination of a New York police officer, were related to counterfeiters in upstate New York.

Antonio Comito was the captive printer, forced by Morello’s gang to produce counterfeit bills at their Highland, New York farm, the winter of 1908-09. Introduced by “Don Pasquale” (most likely Vasi, one of two brothers found guilty for their participation in the counterfeiting operation) in New York City to Don Antonio Cecala, as a prospective printer for Cecala’s Philadelphia press, Cecala in turn introduced Comito to Cecala’s godson, Salvatore Cina. Cina, Comito, and a cart driver, Nicholas Sylvester, shopped in New York for a printing press, then left the city. Instead of taking Comito and his companion, Katrina Pascuzzo, to Philadelphia, as discussed, they went to Cina’s 42 acre fruit farm in Highland, across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie. Cina’s brother-in-law, Vincenzo Giglio, was at the farm when they arrived.

Someone called Uncle Vincent (possibly Giglio), who said he raised cattle in his hometown, stayed with them that winter. He told Comito of killing two men, then fleeing, first by train to Palermo, then sailboat to Tunis, and from there to Tokyo and then Liverpool, before making his way to New Orleans in March 1902.

New Orleans was the first city in America to have a Mafia presence. In 1894, when the Morello-Terranova family went south, looking for work, they made contacts among local mafiosi. A so-called “cousin” got Giuseppe Morello and his stepfather work in sugarcane country; he may have been Antonino Saltaformaggio, an early immigrant from Corleone who would marry Morello’s half-sister. Given Antonino’s youth—he was just twenty at the time—Morello’s most important contact may have been Antonino’s father, Serafino.

Giuseppe Morello and Antonio Saltaformaggio, each of them an eldest son, were at least the second generation of mafiosi in their respective families. Morello was an active Fratuzzi member in Corleone, as was his stepfather, Bernardo Terranova. Saltaformaggio has two maternal uncles who were active in the Fratuzzi, in the years after his death. When his body was identified, the local newspaper pointed to his mother as the source of trouble for the slain man.

***

Lucia Terranova was seventeen when she left Sicily for the first time. She came to the United States with her parents and younger siblings, following her older half-brother, who was fleeing arrest. “Piddu,” as his family called him, was implicated in one murder in Corleone and his companion in flight, Gioachino Lima, was wanted for another. Lima would later marry Giuseppe and Lucia’s sister, Maria Morello.

Giuseppe Morello

It was March 1893, when Lucia and her family met up with Giuseppe in New York City’s East Harlem, where many immigrants from Corleone lived. Along with Lucia and her family, were her sister-in-law, Maria Marsalisi, the wife of Giuseppe, and their first child, a son born after Giuseppe’s flight, and named after his late father, Calogero.

The family was unable to find work in New York, due to the financial crisis, so in January 1894, Morello went on a scouting mission to Louisiana, while Bernardo Terranova and his young family stayed in East Harlem: the Terranova brothers were still children, ages four through nine. In February, Lucia Terranova married Antonino Saltaformaggio in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.

It would have been most correct for Serafino to have met with Bernardo Terranova in person to arrange a marriage between their two children. Based on the known timeline, the decision appears to have either been made quickly, in Louisiana, or else at great length: perhaps arranged years ago in Corleone, or during the Terranova family’s year in New York. If Bernardo was unable to travel, Serafino and Giuseppe—and possibly the groom, Antonino—may have made the arrangements.

The Morello-Terranova family only stayed in Louisiana for about a year before moving on to a new opportunity, farming cotton in another community of transplanted Corleonesi, in Bryan, Texas. Most likely, Lucia stayed in Louisiana with her new husband, whose parents and siblings lived in the area.

***

Serafino, age 52, died in 1899 on a sugar plantation in Poydras, Louisiana, in St. Bernard Parish. His widow, Caterina, appears in the federal census the following year, living in the same parish with two sons and three daughters, including Teresa, who married Santo Calamia in 1901. The marriages between Lucia and Antonino, and between Antonino’s sister, Teresa, and Santo Calamia, bound Giuseppe Morello and the Calamia men in a relationship which Santo would later abridge to brothers-in-law.

Santo Calamia was born in 1875 in Gibellina, Sicily, due west of Corleone, in Trapani province. In Santo’s case, as well, the evidence suggests that Mafia activity ran in the family. It’s not known when his father, Giuseppe, arrived in the United States, but Santo claims to have arrived in 1889. Father and son lived in New Orleans for many years, although Giuseppe returned to Gibellina by 1909.

A Mafia boss, Francesco Genova, fled Sicily, detouring in London and New York before arriving in New Orleans in 1902. On the strength of his criminal reputation, he soon came to rule the Sicilian underworld of New Orleans.

Because of the large Sicilian population in New Orleans and the surrounding area, macaroni was becoming a big business. Stores serving neighboring sugarcane plantations stocked the versatile product among other basic provisions. The largest, most modern macaroni factory was built in New Orleans in 1902 by Jacob Cusimano, of Palermo.

Using agents, Genova attempted to take over a macaroni factory in Donaldsonville, in northeastern Louisiana, on the Mississippi River. “Factory” indicated manufacture at any scale; many macaroni factories at this time were run out of homes and other businesses, such as from the backs of groceries.The factory in Donaldsonville must have been one of the larger operations, to be worthy of a takeover war.

A duplicitous partner in the venture, backed by Genova, was called Paolo (or Charles) Di Christina, an alias for Francesco Paolo Marchese. A letter found in Giuseppe Morello’s possession, from Genova, recommended Marchese to Morello as a fine young man.

The legitimate owners of the Donaldsonville factory, Antonio and Salvadore Luciano, fought back against Genova, but were unlucky enough to miss at close range. When Genova and Di Christina failed to appear in court for a hearing related to the Luciano brothers’ unsuccessful attack, they prepared themselves for a vendetta. They did not wait long.

In May 1902 Santo Calamia, along with Genova, Di Christina, and Joseph Geraci, stormed the Luciano brothers in their “dingy” storefront on Poydras Street. Vincenzo Vutera, who was also killed in the attack, may have also been a Genova plant. Vutera is reported by one witness, a Luciano cousin, to be the first to respond to the attack, firing in their direction with a pistol. According to other accounts from inside the store that night, Vutera—who is described as recent Italian immigrant weighing “fully 800 pounds,” also in the macaroni business—mortally wounded Salvadore Luciano, himself, and was seen doing so by the man’s brother, Antonio.

The record of Vutera’s death cites multiple gunshot wounds, and the news reports that the “big man” continued firing at the invaders, even after he was shot. After the Genova party left, as Salvadore lay dying, people in the street could hear a final shotgun blast: Antonio Luciano’s revenge for Vutera’s treachery. By their exchanges in the police station, Luciano clearly held Calamia responsible. Calamia and Genova were charged with the Luciano and Vutera murders, but acquitted.

Vincent Vutera, alias A. Cusimano, a merchant, age about 42, died from “Mult. G. S. Wounds.”

A year after the Luciano shooting, Santo Calamia’s brother-in-law, Antonino Saltaformaggio, was killed. Antonino worked, at the time, in cotton country as “a kind of labor agent,” and made his home in the same northern town as the Luciano brothers’ coveted macaroni factory. His body was found on 7 April 1903 near White Castle, about ten miles upriver. He had been stabbed nine times, and strangled with a rope, then thrown into a canal. Another victim, never identified, was killed not long before him, in the same area.

Weeks after his body’s discovery, when the victim was finally known, the news mentions Saltaformaggio’s wife and infant son, left behind in Donaldsonville, but not by name, and no connection is drawn to the Morello-Terranova family of New York City. Instead, the Times-Picayune points the finger in the direction of Antonino’s widowed mother and siblings, living in New Orleans, as the probable cause of the violence against a well-liked and hard working young man.

A week later, the body of a Buffalo, New York stonemason was found in a sugar barrel, in New York City. Police detective Joseph Petrosino investigated the crime. The “Barrel Murder” victim, Benedetto Madonia, who was originally from Lercara Friddi, was discovered to be part of a “secret society,” of which Giuseppe Morello was also a part. Vito Cascio Ferro, who was also known to police as a counterfeiter, was among the men brought in on suspicion of the murder.

After her husband’s murder, Lucia Terranova reunited with her family in New York City. The young son mentioned in the news did not go with her. Descendants of Santo Calamia tell me he was named Serafino, after his paternal grandfather, and called “Joe Fino.” I have not found any vital records for Lucia and Antonino in this period, or evidence of any children. (It is notable that in ten years of marriage, Lucia and Antonino had just one child. Lucia had six children in eleven years, in her second marriage.)

In December of that year, three of the Morello-Terranova siblings married, including Lucia, to an associate of her brothers, Vincenzo Salemi. His sister, Lena Salemi, married Giuseppe, who was a widower of eleven years by this time. Ignazio Lupo married Lucia’s sister, Salvatrice.

A 1905 census records Giuseppe Morello in close proximity to the Lo Monte brothers, who were among his closest criminal associates. In this state census, Morello lives with his wife and two children, (one from his first marriage), and calls himself a salesman. Morello was a counterfeiter in 1903, but he also had other ventures, legal and illicit, and whether he continued counterfeiting in those years is not certain. His building cooperative was active and seemingly legitimate in the years after his second marriage. However, in 1907 there was another banking panic, and the Ignatz Florio Building Co-op changed its tactics, a move that more closely aligned them with a growing network of Mafia families in the United States, and at the same time distanced the Co-op from the support of the local Sicilian community. Morello began dipping into the cash reserves of the already strained business.

In 1908, Comito was taken to Highland to print counterfeit bills on Cina’s farm. While he was there that winter, New York homicide police lieutenant Joseph Petrosino was murdered in Palermo.

Joseph Petrosino

In February 1909, Petrosino went to Italy to retrieve the criminal records of Italians in the United States, so they could be arrested and deported. The trip was supposed to be confidential, but one of his superiors leaked it to the press.

That month Giuseppe Palermo, introduced to Comito as “Uncle Salvatore,” (Palermo was also known as Salvatore Saracina) and Ignazio Lupo visited the Highland farm. The conversation among Uncle Salvatore, Ignazio Lupo, and the others who showed up on 12 February 1909 (Cecala, Cina, and Sylvester) strongly suggested that Morello arranged to kill Petrosino while he was in Sicily.

Morello was not the only one implicated in Petrosino’s shooting. Vito Cascio Ferro was also suspected of involvement, because the New York police lieutenant had arrested him in connection with the “Barrel Murder,” in 1903. In one version of events, Cascio Ferro left a dinner party, took his host’s coach into the city where he met Petrosino in a public plaza, shot him, and returned to the party; his host supplied Cascio Ferro with an alibi. Other accounts of the assassination have two gunmen, fleeing the scene. The case was never officially solved.

After Petrosino’s assassination was announced in the news, the Highland counterfeiters discussed the crime again in Comito’s presence. Uncle Vincent said something Comito considered significant, that because Petrosino was killed in Palermo, that “it was well done.”

Santo Calamia’s father, Giuseppe, living in Gibellina, was also wanted by Italian police, as an accessory to the Petrosino shooting. Calamia fled Sicily via London and New York, before being arrested in New Orleans, very near his son’s address on Poydras Street. Reporting at the time indicates his family and close friends were hiding him with the intent to send him to the west coast.

The following winter, Giuseppe Morello and his associates were arrested and found guilty of counterfeiting. Antonio Comito, the captive printer, testified against them. Morello was sentenced to ten years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

Santo Calamia visited Giuseppe Morello in prison in Atlanta four times between 1917-20; in the visitor log, he calls himself Morello’s brother-in-law. Santo’s father, Giuseppe Calamia died in 1921 in Gibellina, and Santo applied for a passport soon after, to settle his father’s estate and arrange for his burial.

Photo from Santo Calamia’s passport application, taken the year before his death

He never made it back from Sicily. Santo died in his native town the following spring.

Morello brought together gangsters from Corleone and elsewhere in southern Italy to produce counterfeit money on a farm in New York.

In the summer of 1909, detective William Flynn sought the source of counterfeit bills flooding banks and businesses in several cities across the United States. He tied the counterfeiting operation to Giuseppe Morello’s gang by following one of the passers of bad bills, Giuseppe Boscarino.

Morello was counterfeiting as early as 1903, when the “barrel murder” victim, one of Morello’s “coiners,” Benedetto Madonia, was lured to his death. In 1906, Morello was producing small denominations of false American and Canadian currency on a farm in Highland, New York, across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie. The initial printing attempts were made using plates created by Antonio B. Milone, a business partner of Morello’s, but they were of too poor a quality to use. Antonio Comito, a printer from Calabria, met the gang through Antonio Cecala, both members of the mutual aid society, the Sons of Italy. Comito testified that he was forced to replace Milone on the farm in Highland.

Antonino Cecala

The Highland farm where the bills were produced was owned first by Salvatore Cina and Vincenzo Giglio, and then sold to Giuseppe Palermo in 1909. Palermo, from Partanna, and the wagon driver, Nicholas Sylvester, a reformatory alum of unknown origin, are of no known relation to any of the other counterfeiters.

Nicholas Sylvester

The first trial’s defendants included Giuseppe Morello and his brother in law, Ignazio Lupo.

Giuseppe Callichio

Antonio Cecala

Salvatore Cina

Vincenzo Giglio

Ignacio Lupo

Giuseppe Morello

Giuseppe Palermo

Nicholas Sylvester

All were found guilty and sentenced to the federal penitentiary near Atlanta.

Antonio Cecala is called the other leading figure in the counterfeiting ring, alongside Morello, in contemporary news accounts. Jon Black at Gang Rule says that Antonio Cecala was also Corleonese, but I have not found his baptism among the records for Corleone available online, nor a marriage for his parents, whose names are known from Cecala’s naturalization record. The manifest of the Iniziativa tell us Antonio and his father traveled together, and that they were both barbers, but not the town where they last lived, or where they were born. (Antonio appears again on a manifest in 1930, traveling with Brooklyn boss Vincent Mangano.)

Critchley writes that Vincenzo Giglio was born in Santo Stefano Quisquina, arrived in New York in 1895, then went to Tampa with Cina. Cina had a reputation as a criminal in his native Bivona, through association with Vassolona, an infamous bandit, and had to flee Sicily. It’s not known how they came to be associates, or why the teenage Vincenzo was traveling with Cina, but they are said to have emigrated together in 1894. Naturalization records for Salvatore Ciona, in Boston, give a date in 1894, but I have not been able to find a matching ship. When he was incarcerated, in 1910, Giglio reported immigrating in 1895.

According to Black, Cina and Giglio are brothers-in-law. I found a marriage for Salvatore Cina and Rosa Giglio in Tampa in 1900, but the record does not give their parents’ names, and there are other Giglios living in Tampa at this time. Rosa Giglio, 18 year old daughter of Angelo, in the 1900 census, has a brother named Vincenzo, which would seem to be a clear match. Her brother is known from a 1904 manifest showing Vincenzo Giglio, a 24 year old (b. 1880) proprietor from Santo Stefano Quisquina, going to his father at the same address, Oak Street in Tampa, where Rosa and her father live, and traveling with his mother, Angela Provenzana. Rosa’s death record confirms that Angelo Giglio and Angela Provenzana are her parents’ names, also. But this Rosa died in Tampa 1918, and her married name was Militello, not Cina.

Other records point to Salvatore Cina and his wife, Rosa Giglio Cina, having two daughters in Tampa, and then moving to New York. It appears there is at least one other couple with similar names to Salvatore and his wife, who also lived in New York around the same time. The other Salvatore Cina/Sena/Cena swore he immigrated in 1905 and lived in New York continuously until his 1919 naturalization. In the 1920 census, Salvatore and Rosa Cina appear, alone, in ED 324 of Manhattan. An infant, Joseph, who died in 1922 may have been either couple’s child. The one who immigrated in 1905 applied for a travel passport six months after Joseph’s death.

Cina, who was part owner in the farm in Highland, and his wife had at least four children. The oldest, Carmela, was born in Tampa in 1904. Antonio Comito testified that Cina visited his farm with Ignazio Lupo and the wagon driver, Sylvester, in 1909. Cina was indicted, along with Lupo, Palermo, Calicchio, and Giglio, for making bad bills. He was sentenced in the first of the two counterfeiting trials in 1910, and paroled in November 1916.

Carmela, his daughter, married in New York City in 1926. In 1930, Salvatore appears in the census for Manhattan, with Rosa and three of their children: the oldest, Jennie, born in Florida, and the youngest, Peter, born the year Salvatore went to prison.

Critchley writes on page 69 of The Origin of Organized Crime in America that Giuseppe Callichio, who was described as an “elderly man” in 1910, was Cina’s godson. However, records indicate Salvatore Cina, born in 1875, was at least twenty years younger than Calicchio. In Black’s account, Antonio Comito, the kidnapped printer, met Cecala’s godson, Salvatore Cina. But again, this would be impossible, as Cecala was born the same year as Cina.

Callichio’s birth year and date of immigration are known from his appearances in federal censuses of the penitentiary outside Atlanta, in 1910 and 1920. The outlying record is the 1910 census, in which Callichio is said to be 53 years old (b. 1857) and a widower. In 1920, he is 68 (b. 1852) and married. He appears on a ship manifest in June 1906, traveling with a daughter. His age at emigration, 54, is a match for the 1920 census. The manifest indicates that he is originally from Puglia, and intends to join his brother in Utica, New York. As well as appearing in the prison in Georgia, the federal census shows Giuseppe Callichio with his family in Oneida, New York in 1910.

A second trial, held two weeks after the first, found at least seven more of Morello’s counterfeiters guilty, including Giuseppe’s half-brother, Nick Terranova.

Giuseppe Armato

Giuseppe Boscarino

Luciano Maddi

Domenico Milone

Nick Terranova

Leoluca Vasi

Pasquale Vasi

Except for Maddi, whose origins are unknown, and Boscarino, who I’ll say more about below, the defendants are from Corleone. Also from Corleone, the LaSalle brothers, Steve and Calogero, were arrested in connection with the counterfeit operation, but I have not found any evidence of indictment. Likewise Antonio B. Milone, Domenico Milone’s third cousin, and the first printer in the Highland venture. Domenico, along with Boscarino, Maddi, Armato, the Vasi brothers, and Nick Terranova, were charged with having and passing the counterfeit bills.

If Cecala was the human connection among half the defendants in the first trial, the center of gravity among the Corleonesi was Leoluchina Armato, the sister of defendant Giuseppe Armato. In 1905 she emigrated with Giuseppe Lagumina, who is her nephew by marriage, and her second cousin, once removed, as well as being a Morello associate. Lagumina’s uncle, Giovanni Rumore, was also a known Morello gangster. (Armato and Rumore were also related: they are second cousins.)

Antonio Biagio Milone

Leoluchina’s brother shared an apartment in New York with brothers Leoluca and Pasquale Vasi. Upon their arrest in 1909, thousands in counterfeit bills were recovered from the apartment. Leoluca Vasi was married to a niece of Domenico Milone. And Domenico was married to Giuseppe and Leoluchina’s sister, Giuseppa Armato. When Flynn had Giuseppe Boscarino, a sixty year old (b. 1849) man from Corleone, followed by detectives, he was seen entering the wholesale grocery store once once owned by Ignazio Lupo, at 236 E 97th St, and at the time owned by Domenico Milone and Luciano Maddi.

Giuseppe Boscarino, alias Giuseppe Monte

Jon Black writes that Giuseppe Boscarino was born around 1850 in Corleone. According to Flynn, Boscarino immigrated in 1890 and was a known associate of the “Black Hand” in New York’s Little Italy. One of his close friends was Don Vito Cascio Ferro, who would become powerful enough to disrupt local leadership of the Fratuzzi in Corleone, in the first decade of the twentieth century. I have not been able to confirm Boscarino’s birth or immigration. There is at least one Boscarino/Boscarelli family in Corleone, distinguished by their address (they live near the most important families in town, in 1834) and honorifics: they’re called “don” and “donna” in Church records. There is a baptismal record that appears to be a match for Giuseppe Boscarelli, in December 1849 in Corleone, but that child died at age three.

Antonio B. Milone immigrated in 1889 with his father, Alberto. Milone and Gaetano Reina, one of Morello’s captains, are second cousins. In 1903, Milone became an officer in Giuseppe Morello’s new building cooperative. In 1907, the Banker’s Panic wiped out the Co-op. Antonio married a woman from Milan, the following year.

Comito gave testimony against his captors, and avoided prosecution. Despite having been identified as an integral parts of the counterfeiting operation, Antonio Milone and Giuseppe Boscarino both avoided prosecution.

At the end of Prohibition, the Young Turks fought a colonial war for the Sicilian Mafia in New York.

The Families of the Genovese and Lucchese trace their roots directly to two mafiosi from Corleone: boss Giuseppe Morello, and his captain, Gaetano “Tommy” Reina. During the first Mafia war in New York, between the Corleonesi and the Napolitani, Morello’s half-brother Nick Terranova was killed by one of the Camorra (the Neapolitan Mafia), and their brother Vincenzo took over the Morello-Terranova Family. Reina left and formed his own Family, which he put under the protection of Joe Masseria (originally from Menfi, a coastal town in Agrigento province) in the late 1920s.

Prohibition strengthened the Mafia, providing them the opportunity, according to Joe Valachi, to get into racketeering in a big way, on the level with other, non-Mafia criminal organizations operating in the US. In 1922, Masseria survived an assassination attempt. He made Morello his conisigliere. Increasingly, the Mafia in the US overcame its provincial prejudices enough to forge working relationships with Jewish, Irish, and African-American criminals, and for the first mixed gangs to form. Yet a long simmering antagonism between Sicilians from Corleone and those from Castellammare del Golfo flared once more at the end of Prohibition.

The Castellammarese War of 1930 in New York was a colonial war. On one side was Joe Masseria, the most powerful figure in organized crime, with a coalition of allies including the Corleonesi Giuseppe Morello, Lucky Luciano (from Lercara Friddi), and Al Capone (born in New York of Italian mainland parents). On the other side were Salvatore Maranzano and the Castellammarese, backed by Don Vito Cascio Ferro, one of the most powerful men in Sicily at the time. Cascio Ferro sent Salvatore Maranzano to New York to form a monopoly on criminal enterprise. When Joe Valachi got out of prison the first time, he emerged to learn of “trouble in the air” between Tom Gagliano and Ciro Terranova. This was the beginning of the war.

This war is often characterized as one between the “Young Turks” behind Masseria, and the “Mustache Petes” on Maranzano’s. Although Masseria was killed first, it was the Young Turks who ultimately won New York.

Cascio Ferro had lived for a few years in the US, in New York and in the South, like the Morello-Terranova family. He escaped prosecution for his participation in Morello’s counterfeiting racket, and returned to Sicily in 1904. His power there extended over several towns, including Corleone, where he temporarily eclipsed the native Fratuzzi. In 1909, he ordered the murder of the American policeman, Joe Petrosino, who pursued him on charges of killing Benedetto Madonia in New York, the famous “Barrel Murder.” Following his arrest in 1925, Ferro’s star began to fall. Mussolini’s prefect in Palermo, Cesare Mori, attempted to stamp out the Mafia entirely, from 1925-29. Ferro was imprisoned for life, beginning in 1930.

Before the Castellammarese War, Tommy Reina began paying tribute to Joe Masseria. Masseria put additional pressure on Reina, who may have switched to Maranzano’s side. Whether he did or not, the rumor of it reached Masseria, who ordered Reina’s murder. Masseria was killed in April 1931. Accounts of Masseria’s assassination vary and legends abound. It appears that the animosity came from his own men, who resented the war’s effects on their own profits.

Maranzano, the victor, held a meeting in which he laid out many of the structural details that would later form Lucky Luciano’s “Commission”: the rules that would permit the peaceful coexistence of New York’s Five Families, as well as Mafia families in other American cities. Despite these signs of progress, Maranzano was regarded by his lieutenants as another “Mustache Pete.” Besides his support from the clannish Castellammarese, there was his distrust of Luciano’s Jewish associates. The “Young Turks” struck again. Maranzano was killed five months after Masseria.

There are three first cousins from Corleone who immigrated to New York around the same time, and had the same name: Stefano la Sala. One was born in 1881, another in 1888, and the third in 1892. One would become known as Steve LaSalle, a high-ranking member of the Lucchese crime family for half a century.

In Corleone, it’s not unusual for a boy to have the same name, first and last, as his cousins. If the boy is the oldest in his family, and he has five paternal uncles, he can expect to have up to five first cousins with exactly the same name as his own. Like himself, the oldest sons of his father’s brothers would be named after their paternal grandfather. The tradition of naming the first born boy and girl after their paternal grandparents is followed by practically every family in Corleone.

When I mentioned Steve LaSalle in this blog a couple weeks ago, I’d only discovered two of the three Stefano la Salas from Corleone. Not only that, I’d found so many clues connecting the oldest cousin to Morello’s crime family, that I was sure he was LaSalle. He is not, but he has his own Mafia connections. I’ll come back to him next week.

Of the three cousins, the youngest, son of Simone la Sala, is the one I found last, and know the least about. When he registered for the WWI draft in 1917, this Stefano la Sala, born in 1892, was living in East Harlem with his mother. He worked in the piano manufacturing business, for Strauch Bros., at 13th St. & 10th Ave in Manhattan. Little as I know of him, I can be sure he is not Steve LaSalle, either: he’s too young to be mistaken for a man born in November 1888 or 1889, as he’s described in Critchley’s “Organized Crime in America.”

The middle cousin, born seven years later, is the son of Biagio la Sala, a baker. Biagio and his older brother, Francesco, the father of the oldest Stefano, immigrated to New York together, with their wives and children, in the mid 1890s. Both families settled in the Bronx.

Based on his reported birth date (Critchley), the year he immigrated, 1897, from Richard Wagner and his co-authors, and the names of his brothers, it is the middle cousin, born in 1888, who was Steve LaSalle. His baptismal record from Corleone confirms Stefano la Sala was born 5 November 1888. This does not match the date of birth reported on LaSalle’s WWI draft card, which says he was born on the eighth. However, his home address is a match for the census, where he lives with so many family members there is no question as to his identity, and so is his profession as a plasterer.

A 1972 feature on the Mafia in LIFE Magazine says “The old man, Steve LaSalle, the underboss of New York’s Luchese [sic] family, was himself born into a Mafia family.” I have not found any evidence so far of the La Sala family’s involvement in the Fratuzzi, the Mafia in Corleone. On Steve’s mother’s side, the Liggio men were successful millers. On his father’s, the baker’s paternal grandmother was from a family of merchants who immigrated to Corleone from the Papal States in the early 19th century. The LaSalles are of no relation to Luciano Leggio or the other Leggio family members who are defendants at the 1969 Mafia trial in Bari. However, they are related to the Moscato family, by marriage and godparenthood. The Moscato family in Corleone are all descendants of a man from Siculiana, in Agrigento province. They have organized criminal ties going back to Rapanzino’s gang, in the 1830s, and continue to appear in Italian records of mafia activity into the 1960s. Francesco Moscato, Steve LaSalle’s first cousin, was in the Morello gang. It appears that at least one and possibly two of Steve’s brothers were also involved.

The Morello gang’s bread and butter was counterfeiting. According to Bill Feather, Steve had a criminal record from 1909 for counterfeiting, as well as murder and grand larceny. Steve and his brother, Vito, ran a numbers racket that was one of the largest in New York around 1930, according to The Valachi Papers. Another brother, Calogero, is mentioned in lists of known mafiosi, though I haven’t been able to find out anything in particular. It appears that he was active in the Morello gang, but that after the Mafia-Camorra War, he was no longer connected with organized crime.

Steve is named as a participant in the Mafia-Camorra War, on the Morello-Terranova side. On 24 June 1916, he attended a meeting of the Morello gang with the Navy Street and Coney Island gangs, where he argued—by some accounts with Nick Terranova—for the assassination of Joe DeMarco. On 20 July, Steve joined “Louis the Wop,” Nick Sassi, and Ciro Terranova in recruiting Lefty Esposito to help them kill Joe DeMarco.Other than the Terranova brothers, the key targets of the Camorra included Steve LaSalle, Eugenio Ubriaco, and possibly Joseph Verrazano: more evidence that LaSalle was highly placed in the organization.

Steve LaSalle was arrested on 4 September 1916, and still in custody three days later when Nick Terranova and Ubriaco were assassinated, by Camorra member Alessandro Vollero. (At least one source calls the other victim Nick’s bodyguard.) No doubt, Steve’s arrest saved his life.

The price was a stay at Sing Sing Prison, where Steve registered for the draft for WWI the following summer. Steve worked as a plasterer in prison. Several of the sons of Francesco and Biagio la Sala, including the two cousins born 1881 and 1888, worked in construction trades. Francesco and the oldest Stefano la Sala, his son, started a stone and brick masonry company in 1908. Steve LaSalle and his brother, Charlie (born Calogero) were both plasterers. Their brother Victor (born Vito) la Sala was later a bricklayer, but at this time owned a garage, where he employed another brother, Dominick.

Following his release from prison, Steve was affiliated with Tommy Reina’s gang, and would remain so until his retirement. (Reina, who was a captain in Morello’s organization, formed his own Bronx-based gang around the time of the Mafia-Camorra War.) Steve, Victor, Dominick, and Charlie lived with their parents in the Bronx in 1920, along with three sisters. Three of the brothers were in construction but Dominick, no longer employed by his brother’s garage, was now in ladies’ hats. (The garment industry was a popular racket, and one closely associated with LaSalle.)

Their father died in 1924, and their mother, in 1930. Based on his children’s ages, Victor married by 1926 to Margaret, from Nebraska. They had two children, a girl and a boy. Neither Steve nor any other member of the LaSalle family appear in the 1930 federal census at their previous Bronx address.

Gaetano “Tommy” Reina, who had avoided the Mafia-Camorra War that fragmented the Morello gang, was killed in 1930, in the Castellammarese War. His operations were taken over by Tommy Gagliano, who ran the family until his death in 1951. Gagliano and Reina, both from Corleone, are distantly related by marriage: Gagliano’s second cousin, once removed, was Reina’s wife. Gagliano and Reina are each related to LaSalle, though even more distantly.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, Bill Feather reports that LaSalle lived in the Bronx, ran a large numbers operation, and became a power player in the garment industry. At the same time, he maintained a relatively low profile. His home is described as a “modest, two-family house” by the retired police officer interviewed in Pileggi’s 1972 article. Census and military records point to LaSalle living in New Jersey in 1940-42.

Today’s maps show a small, brick condominium, built in 1927, at LaSalle’s Cliffside Park address. In the 1940 federal census (the most recent publicly available) Steve, unmarried and living alone in Bergen County, calls himself a plasterer. Between 1940-42, his brother, Victor, moved his family from Fairfield, CT to Englewood Cliffs, NJ, five miles from Steve’s address. In his WWII draft registration, Steve named his brother, Victor, as his contact person. (Victor named his wife.)

Critchley writes, “LaSalle would become an influential member of the post Gaetano Reina organized crime Family under its various titles, reaching the post of consiglieri.” Other sources say he was made the underboss of the Lucchese family around 1951, under Gaetano “Tommy” Lucchese. LaSalle and Lucchese may have attended the Apalachin Summit together in 1957. He continued to serve under Lucchese’s successors: “Eddie” Coco and Carmine Tramunti.

LaSalle retired from the Lucchese family around 1972. According to the LIFE article published that year in March, his income came from ownership of a small garment factory. He was reportedly making $20,000 a year , an income equivalent to $110K today. He married and had a son.

Pileggi wrote early in 1972 that “Today, LaSalle, who is 83 and almost blind, is still being watched.” Although at least one source reports his death in 1974, an SSDI record that matches his name and date of birth tells us that Steve died at the age of 87, in November 1975. According to the record of his death, his last address was in Queens.

While most of Rapanzino’s gang was exterminated by the police in the mid-1830s, their legacy continues, with a clear line of descent, all the way to the Five Families of New York and the Mafia in Corleone today.

The Rapanzino gang of cattle thieves, active in the early 1830s in Palermo province, were closely related to known mafia members in Corleone. Two of the members, Bernardo and Antonino Palumbo, were brothers, and their second cousin, Leoluca Mondello, was also in their gang. Mondello and the leader, Rapanzino, were killed on the same day by the police. Two other members of the gang were Biagio Jannazzo and his older brother, Paolo. Although not closely related to the Palumbo brothers, by blood or marriage, the two families were evidently close: Biagio and Paolo’s parents were Antonino Palumbo’s godparents.

Ninetta Bagarella

On their mother’s side, the Palumbo brothers were cousins of Vincenzo Maida, a rural guard. A common practice in that time, was for guards like Maida to negotiate for the return of stolen property. For this reason, it was a requirement of the position, that guards have close relations with criminals. Salvatore Lupo describes a typical arrangement: a mafia boss would go to the victim of a theft to express his sympathy, and to say maybe he can make some inquiries and find out what happened to the stolen goods. But he’s behind the theft and makes his money from the owner who pays to restore his goods.

Denis Mack Smith writes that the most common crimes in Sicily around this time were smuggling food into towns to avoid taxation, the illicit control of water, extortion—often through threats of arson to crops—and “abigeato”: stealing farm animals. It’s likely that Rapanzino’s gang worked with Maida, and other rural guards, to whom the thieves would kick back a proportion of their gains.

It’s not clear to me, what forces led to the police action against this band. Possibly the geographic scope of their activity brought the thieves from Corleone into conflict with neighboring mafias, each district an ecosystem of peasants, thieves, guards, and landowners. Or members of the band may have angered their local boss in some way. At any rate, by 1833, they were being hunted down by police, on orders from Palermo.

Despite being a wanted man in June 1834, the young widower Nicolo’ “Puntillo” Ciavarello remarried in Corleone, to Maria Marino. The Palumbo brothers were guillotined in Palermo the following year… that is, unless they escaped to Tunis, as legend has it. Paolo Jannazzo’s fate is not known. He did not marry in Corleone, and there is no record of his death there, either. Possibly he met the same fate as the Palumbo brothers.

In 1838, “Puntillo” and his wife stood as godparents to Mariano Cascio, Maria’s first cousin. Puntillo’s old band mate, Biagio Jannazzo, married Rosa Cascio, the sister of Mariano, in 1843. Rosa and Mariano’s sister, Emmanuela, married Vincenzo Maida, the guard, in 1849. Another of their sisters, Lucia, was the mother of future boss, Michelangelo Gennaro.

In 1840, a sister of the Jannazzo brothers, Lucia, married Vincenzo Terranova. Their son, Bernardo, is a known member of the mafia in Corleone, and the stepfather of Giuseppe Morello, a founding member of the Genovese crime family in New York.

Rapanzino, killed at age 27, didn’t marry. His niece, Maria Carmela Milone, married Domenico Moscato. Domenico’s cousin, Maria Carmela Chiazzisi, married Spiridione Castro, a cart driver—one of the rural entrepreneurial professions associated with the mafia. Spiridione’s nephew, Luciano Castro, is called a mezzano, an “intermediary” or middleman, in the 1853 civil record of his son’s birth: another mafia-related profession.

One of Biagio Jannazzo’s daughters, Leoluchina, married Bernardo Moscato, first cousin of Domenico. Leoluchina and Bernardo’s daughter, Domenica, married Placido Crapisi, son of mafia member Luciano. Her brother, Luciano, married their first cousin on his mother’s side, Angela Gennaro, sister of Michelangelo.

Biagio’s youngest son, born in 1849 and named Paolo, after his uncle, married twice, the second time to his long time domestic partner, when Paolo was considered to be “in extremis,” close to death, in 1906. He lived another nine years.

Epifanio Palumbo, the uncle of the Palumbo brothers, is the third great grandfather of Ninetta Bagarella. Ninetta is the youngest daughter of Salvatore Bagarella, a soldier in the Liggio-Navarra war. Salvatore and two of Ninetta’s brothers were named as defendants in the 1969 trial in Bari. She is the wife of Toto Riina. The family has been in the news recently, after a local Church confraternity paid homage at Ninetta’s home in Corleone. The “inchino” (a word that translates to “bow” or “curtsy”) a gesture of respect made during religious processions, is forbidden toward known Mafia figures by decree of the archbishop in Monreale. When it has occurred elsewhere in Italy, as in Caltagirone in March, there have been charges of disruption of public order. The family and the mayor of Corleone both deny that the inchino happened there.

There are many undocumented claims made about the relationships between notable mafiosi. One mafia writer who has led me on a merry chase for the mythical relations of Giuseppe Morello is Joe Bruno. In a blog post from 2005, he repeats the legend that Giuseppe had an older brother named Antonio. Antonio Morello was born in 1864, Bruno writes, and another Morello brother, Nick, was born in 1866.

It’s true that Giuseppe had a younger half brother named Nick—Nicolo’ Terranova, born in 1890. But Antonio Morello, the made man of Corleone, never existed, although Joe Bruno says he was suspected of 30-40 murders in the 1890s.

Not to say Giuseppe Morello didn’t have family relations to organized crime in Corleone. His stepfather, Bernardo Terranova, was the nephew of Biagio and Paolo Jannazzo, who were both active in Rapanzino’s gang in the 1830s. Through Morello’s maternal grandmother, his Grizzaffi relations connect him to important families in the local mafia: Di Miceli, Gagliano, Streva, Cascio, and Majuri.

Antonio, Nick and Joe Morello were all inducted into the mafia in Corleone, Joe Bruno wrote on his mafia blog in 2010. He names two more half-brothers of Giuseppe Morello, Ciro Terranova, and Ignazio Saietta. In fact, Ciro was Morello’s half brother, as was Nick. Who Bruno calls Saietta is actually Ignazio Lupo: Lupo’s mother’s maiden name was Saietta. “Lupo” means “wolf,” which is how Ignazio got his nickname.

Bruno goes on to write that Antonio Morello was killed in 1898. There is a man by this name who died on 18 February 1898 in Manhattan. He was older than Joe says Antonio was, 46 (born around 1852). The decedent was married, and his parents’ names appear as Linone (which is probably a transcription error—possibly Simone) and Catrina. Giuseppe Morello’s parents’ names were Calogero and Angela.

Mike Dash dispels the myth of Antonio Morello in the preface to his book, “The First Family”:

“Another account held that Giuseppe had a brother, Antonio, who preceded him as boss in New York, and who once shot dead the dreaded leader of a rival criminal society, the Camorra. The battered transcripts of Antonio Morello’s 1892 murder trial, rescued in the early 1980s from a dumpster and now archived in an obscure law library, reveal that he was neither a member of the Mafia nor any relation to his more celebrated “brother,” and also that the man he killed was a one-armed organ grinder with no criminal record who had crudely insulted Morello’s wife.”

Giuseppe Morello is the son of Calogero Morello and Angela Piazza, who married in Corleone in 1866.

The marriage record of Calogero Morello and Angela Piazza

Giuseppe was born the following year, named after his paternal grandfather. He had only one full sibling, Maria, named after their grandmother. Calogero died in 1872, and Angela remarried the following year to the mafioso Bernardo Terranova. Angela and Bernardo had six children that I know of: Lucia (1877), Salvatrice (1880), Vincenzo (1885), Ciro (1888), Nicolo’ (1890), and Rosalia (1892).

Giuseppe married twice, first in Corleone to Maria Rosa Marsalisi. Their first child, Angela, died in infancy. They had a son, Calogero, who immigrated with his mother and paternal relatives in March 1893. The extended Terranova family—Giuseppe’s mother and stepfather, siblings, his wife and their son—originally immigrated to New York. At some point, Maria Rosa returned to Corleone, where she died in 1898. Her son, Calogero, remained in the US with his father. The family moved south when the American economy collapsed in the 1910s. Their New Orleans contact was Giuseppe’s first cousin once removed, Leoluca Trombatore, from Corleone.

Another Corleonesi who lived in Louisiana was Vincenzo Collura. In 1908, Vincenzo’s brother, Giovanni, escorted his bride on the voyage to join him. Also traveling at that time were brother and sister, Leoluca and Serafina Grizzaffi, bound for another thriving southern community of Sicilians, in Bryan, Texas. The Grizzaffis were third cousins, once removed from both Leoluca Trombatore and from Vincenzo Collura, and third cousins of Giuseppe Morello. (There is another Vincenzo Collura from Corleone, eighteen years younger, and of no known relation. The latter, known as “Mr. Vincent,” also lived in the US for a time, but returned to Sicily and was an associate of Dr. Navarra’s after WWII.)

When the Terranova-Morello family returned to New York, Ignazio Lupo and Giuseppe Morello married, just weeks apart. Ignazio married Giuseppe’s half sister, Salvatrice. Giuseppe, a widower, remarried to another Corleone native, Nicolena Salemi, the daughter of a gabelloto. (Nicolena is my second cousin, four times removed.) At Giuseppe’s marriage, Ignazio and Salvatrice stand as witnesses.

Giuseppe’s son from his first marriage, Calogero, followed his father into the family business, and was killed in 1912. Giuseppe and Lena named their third child after him, around nine years later.

People have been harvesting snow, to enjoy in the summer months, for thousands of years. The mafia has been in the ice business for hundreds of those years.

Businesses that provide what people are not willing to live without, prosper. Although best known today for their links to the vice trades, the mafia has deep roots in essential services: protection (racketeering) and transportation. One manifestation was the snow trade.

A thousand years before refrigeration, the Arabs brought sorbet and granita to Sicily, where they continue to define the local flavor. In the 18th century, the Parliament in Palermo was sardonically referred to as “the ice cream Parliament,” because its members were more interested in fine dining than legislation.

But snow was not just for the wealthy. Even poor Palermitans enjoyed snow-cooled drinks in the summer. In fact, the use of snow in summer is a practice older than antiquity. Proverbs 25:13 reads, “As the cold of snow in the time of harvest, so is a faithful messenger to them that send him: for he refresheth the soul of his masters.”

For the souls of Palermo to be refreshed in the sultry Mediterranean summer, required the services of an entire industry: the snow trade.

Snow harvests began in the mountains late in the winter, where workers pounded it into hard, icy blocks and stored them in caves, cellars, and on the shady sides of cliffs. Every day of the delivery season, blocks of pounded snow were wrapped in straw and salt, and placed on mule back for the arduous trek to market.

In the days before roads linked Sicily’s coastal cities with its interior, the principal form of transportation was by sea, in small boats that never strayed far from shore. Most land travel was along livestock runs called “trazzere.” Passable by horse, mule, or goat, they were impassable by carriage. In some central villages, people lived their whole lives never seeing a wheeled cart or carriage. Every product that traveled from the interior of the island to the coast, or the reverse, went by mule train.

Getting ice from the mountains to the city of Palermo was the sole domain of the mafia from the early 1700s, with only brief interruption by the Austrians in 1821, during one of Sicily’s unsuccessful revolts. Ice was considered so integral to the war effort, that it was deemed necessary to wrangle its transport monopoly from the local organizations which dominated the snow trade.

Because of its value and short shelf life, the safe and timely transportation of ice deliveries was a key concern. In 1800, there was only one road to Palermo from central Sicily: a number that had been stable since antiquity, but would double in the next fifty years. By the end of the 19th century, the island was finally served by railroads connecting its port cities. Their construction had taken decades, being continuously thwarted by the mafia, who correctly sensed competition.

Mule trains required security details to deter theft: like another Sicilian product in much demand, ice was subject to piracy. In the 19th century, citrus production was the leading economic indicator of mafia activity in Sicily. From the 18th century until after the second World War, refrigeration was supplied by the snow trade.

Regular deliveries of ice in the cities of Europe and the United States in the 19th century led to advancements in ice box technology. Plain wooden boxes evolved with insulating layers of materials from sawdust to zinc. In New York, in the first half of the 20th century, the ice man, making his daily deliveries, was a ubiquitous presence, like another relic of that time, the milk man. Vincenzo “The Tiger” Terranova, Giuseppe Morello’s half-brother and godson, was an ice man in New York City, frequently observed working his rounds, bringing solid blocks of relief to the sweltering tenements of New York.

In Eugene O’Neill’s play, “The Iceman Cometh,” set in 1913 in New York, there’s a recurring joke about an alcoholic salesman, Hickey’s wife being “in the hay” with “the iceman.” I grew up with similar jokes about the mailman: he made a convenient cuckold, the man with legitimate business on women’s doorsteps, while their husbands were off at work. (My father worked for the post office: my sister and I really were the mailman’s kids.) O’Neill’s iceman has a double meaning, one that could apply just as well to Terranova.

The Terranova-Morello gang would grow to become the current Genovese crime family in New York. While it would be reasonable to assume that Vincenzo’s ice delivery business was a cover, disguising the collection rounds of a racketeering business, it could have very well been an essential source of legitimate income. Despite his flashy mode of dress “the Morello elite lived only one step from penury,” says David Critchley, giving this as the reason for Terranova’s day job.

As the leadership of the Morello gang, Vincenzo (also called Vincent Terranova) and his associates engaged primarily in counterfeiting. (A business the family has engaged in for more than a century: in 2008, his estate was sued for selling counterfeit goods on Canal Street.) In a war against competing gangs in the 1910s, they bombed the tenements of their enemies in East Harlem, and their own home was bombed in retaliation. Vincenzo assaulted a policeman, and was sentenced to ten days in jail. A few years after that, his brother, Nick, was killed by members of a Brooklyn gang, and Vincenzo replaced him as boss of the Morello family.

Terranova was killed just blocks from his home, in a drive-by shooting in 1922, another casualty of the same gang wars that had taken his brother. Vincenzo, the ice man, was “on ice.”

In O’Neill’s play, Hickey’s wife is revealed to have been killed by her husband, so that his references to her sleeping with the iceman come to mean, in retrospect, that she is dead: sleeping with the fishes, as they say. Over the course of the play, the characters of Hickey and of the titular Iceman gradually merge into one. Like the ice delivery man, death comes to us all. To borrow the words of another 20th century writer, “Ask not for whom the iceman cometh; he comes for thee.”